Onyx shook his head and turned away. The darkness shrouded his face but his body language looked frustrated. Magic flared around him as he opened a black gateway; he stepped through and Lisa hurried through after him without needing to be told. The gateway closed and I was left alone on the hillside.
I watched thoughtfully for a moment, then turned to make my way home.
* * *
“
But what was Onyx doing there?” Sonder asked an hour and a half later.
Arachne’s cave is wide and oval-shaped, hidden under Hampstead Heath and hollowed out of stone that’s been worn smooth by the passage of hundreds of years. Clothes cover the furniture and every inch of the walls, turning the cave into a riot of green and blue and yellow and red. There are small changing rooms to one side and at the far end a tunnel leads down into darkness.
Sonder was sitting on the edge of one of the chairs, his clothes rumpled from a day spent indoors. He has messy black hair, a pair of glasses, and a way of peering at whatever he’s reading that makes it look like he’s completely oblivious to everything else, which is usually true. He’s twenty-one but looks like a first-year university student. He still had his arms full of papers, and the reports he’d been reading were spread out over a pile of coats on the table in front of him. He pushed his glasses up automatically as he waited for my answer.
“I don’t know,” I said from my sofa. I was more tired than I should have been; the escape from Fountain Reach had taken a lot out of me and I obviously hadn’t fully recovered from Anne’s spell yet. “But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be there either.”
“Do you think it’s him?” Luna called. She was hidden behind the curtain of one of the changing rooms. “Him and Morden, I mean.”
“They’re vicious enough,” I said. “But it seems like an odd thing for him to do.”
“Onyx?” I could feel Luna shudder. “He’d do anything.”
“Anything Morden tells him to. Don’t forget that.”
“We know they take slaves,” Luna said. “Like that girl Lisa. Maybe that’s where the apprentices are going.”
“There’s no way Morden would take that kind of risk,” I said. “The reason he got involved in the hunt for the fateweaver was because he wanted to become Council representative of the Dark mages. If he kept them as slaves it’d get out sooner or later, and as soon as that happened he’d lose any chance he ever had of getting that position.”
“But what if-Oh, Arachne, could you have a look?”
“Of course, dear,” Arachne said from her perch in the corner. She was working on something in vivid green. “Come right out.”
Arachne is a weaver, the best I know, and everything in her lair is her own work. She’s been making clothes since before I was born-probably since before my great-great-grandparents were born. She trades the clothes to mages and adepts in return for services and information, but honestly, I think she’d be just as happy to give them away. Arachne’s a maker, and for her creating is its own reward.
She’s also a giant spider, which bothers most people, although these days I hardly notice. Arachne had been working on the cloth in front of her with her four front legs, but now she turned her eight opaque eyes upwards as Luna stepped out from behind the curtain wearing a rose-coloured dress with a square neckline and ruffles. “What do you think?” Luna said doubtfully.
Sonder looked up as soon as Luna started to come out, and now he stared. “Um,” he said at last. “It’s, uh, good. Really good.”
“Definitely not,” Arachne said firmly, clicking her mandibles. “Not for where you’re going. We’ll save that one for the summer.”
Luna disappeared behind the curtain. “What did you and Luna turn up?” I asked Sonder.
Sonder was still staring after Luna. “Sonder!” I said more loudly.
Sonder jumped. “What?”
“The disappearances,” I said. “You know, what you and Luna were looking at all day?”
“Right,” Sonder said. “Okay.” He pushed his glasses up and started going through his papers again. “Where did you want to start?”
“With the victims,” I said. From the changing room came the rustle of clothes, and from the corner the quick flick-flick-flick of Arachne’s needle. “Who were they?”
“Well, um,” Sonder said. “The first is Caroline Montroyd. She was apprenticed to an air mage in London but she lived with her parents in Watford. She left her master’s sanctum one night and never came home. Her parents called the police, but they didn’t find anything and the police think she ran away. She’d been having arguments with her father and mother and talking about leaving, and at first everyone thought that was what had happened, but. .”
“But it’s a bit of a coincidence,” I said with a nod. “Go on.”
“The second one’s name is Chaven,” Sonder said. He was beginning to focus again now. “Force mage, supposed to be a really good duellist, was actually one of the favourites for the White Stone. He’d mostly dropped out of university but he was still staying in the halls of residence for London Metropolitan. We don’t know for sure when he disappeared. The doorman said he saw him go in one night, and he didn’t show up for classes the next day. No one saw him leave.
“Then there’s Ness,” Sonder said, and he looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Vanessa, I mean. I. . actually know her. She used to come to one of the classes I was teaching. Well, not really teaching, but the mage who was supposed to be doing it wasn’t there, and. . um. Anyway. She lived alone in a flat. She made it home one night and no one ever saw her again.”
“Then how the hell did she vanish?” I said in annoyance. “Did someone kick the door down or what?”
“Nothing like that,” Sonder said. “The door was locked. Nothing was broken. Although. . Well, I was talking to the neighbours and the woman from the flat next door said she thought Ness had had a visitor after midnight. She heard a bell and voices.”
“What kind of voices?”
“She didn’t remember.”
“Okay. So what did you see?”
Sonder is a time mage. It’s got a few similarities to my own style of magic, but the things he can do with it are very different. For one thing, he can actually affect space and time directly, although it’s not what he specialises in. What Sonder is really good at is history: looking back and seeing what happened. You’d think that would make solving mysteries pretty easy and it does, at least when you’re dealing with normals. But in the magical world the abilities of time mages are well known and other mages take precautions against them.
“I couldn’t find Caroline,” Sonder said. “I traced her into the Underground but then there were the crowds and the interference, and. . Anyway. Chaven was a bit easier. I got a look at the halls, and he was definitely there in his room with some friends. Then he went to bed, and. . nothing. Greyed out. Someone used a shroud effect over that temporal area. The same with Ness. I traced it and the whole route back to the entrance was concealed.”
Shrouds are magical items that block scrying, especially the temporal kind that Sonder does. They’re not cheap and they’re generally only used by people who are very serious about keeping their activities a secret. I thought for a minute. “What about cameras?”
“Which ones?”
“Halls of residence have security cameras,” I said. “So do most blocks of flats. And they store the records. If you saw the shroud effect, then you can narrow down what time you need to be looking at.”
“Yes, but they wouldn’t have let me look at them.” Sonder looked uncomfortable. “I wasn’t even supposed to be there.”
“But Talisid will know people who could look at them.”
“Wouldn’t they have tried them already?”
“Mages tend to assume magic’s the solution to everything,” I said with a smile. I’d fallen into that trap this afternoon. “It’s worth a try.”